The boom in artificial intelligence has made Microsoft the most valuable company in the world – even ahead of Apple. Now the US company wants to expand its AI applications in Germany.
Microsoft will invest almost 3.3 billion euros in Germany over the next two years to massively expand its data center capacities for artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing applications. Microsoft President Brad Smith announced this on Thursday in Berlin during a conversation with Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD). The largest single investment in Microsoft’s 40-year history in Germany also includes an AI training program intended to reach up to 1.2 million people.
According to dpa information, the investment funds will flow primarily to North Rhine-Westphalia, where Microsoft wants to set up a new cloud region. The group is looking for physical proximity to major customers such as Bayer and RWE in order to keep data transit times (latency) between the data centers and the applications as low as possible. Hesse will also benefit from the Microsoft investments. The Rhine/Main region is Germany’s leading location for data centers due to the large Internet node DE-CIX in Frankfurt. The existing Microsoft cloud region Rhine/Main will be further expanded.
Wüst: Microsoft promotes the transformation of the economy
North Rhine-Westphalia Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst (CDU) viewed Microsoft’s investment as “a strong signal for Germany and a great contribution to structural change in the Rhenish region.” With this billion-dollar decision, Microsoft is making a significant contribution to sustainably driving forward the transformation of the economy in North Rhine-Westphalia. “The fact that a global player is making such an investment in North Rhine-Westphalia is a sign of trust and the result of concrete location policy.”
With a total investment of 3.5 billion US dollars (3.26 billion euros), Germany leads the list of investment announcements by the world’s leading software company: Microsoft President Smith promised last November that 2.5 billion pounds would be invested in Great Britain by 2026 (2.9 billion euros) to invest in driving the growth of AI applications. Just over a month earlier, during a visit to Australia, he had promised an investment of five billion Australian dollars (around three billion euros) in the AI sector.
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Microsoft is a leading player in the international AI market, also because the software company invested several billion dollars early on to invest in the Californian AI start-up OpenAI. The San Francisco company presented its text robot ChatGPT to a broader public in November 2022, triggering a wave of AI. Microsoft has meanwhile invested billions more to build up large computing capacities for training AI. The group uses AI technology, among other things, in its search engine Bing and as a “copilot” in its office programs. The main competitor of the software giant from Redmond is Google with its AI program Gemini.
Source: Stern
